Revolutions in Communication:
Media history from Gutenberg to the Digital Age
Written
by Bill Kovarik, Professor
of Communications, Radford College
Textbook
to be published by Continuum Books in 2011
About
the Book:
We are living at the crest of a communication
revolution.
It’s not the first – several other
communication revolutions have left their impacts – but it is the most significant.
The rise of the Information Age, the fall
of the traditional media, and the bewildering explosion of personal information services are all connected to the historical
chain of communications revolutions.
We need to understand these revolutions because
they influence our present and future as much as any other trend in history. And we need to understand them not simply
on a national basis – an unstable foundation for history in any event – but rather as part of the emergent global
communications network.
REVOLUTIONS
IN COMMUNICATION, as a university level textbook, examines these issues on the
broadest possible level with a variety of supplemental and extensible peripheral information modules.
The book brings a much-needed updating to media histories
used in colleges today, explaining changes in technology (including the most recent digital media, such as Twitter) and providing Communications students with a variety of historical frames of reference
for all their respective fields.
This project will also use new communications
technologies to invite international collaboration through a blog and wiki about media history. The book and web site
structure will serve as the student’s starting point, the professor’s resource and the author's experiment in
an important area of history.
AUTHOR’S
WEB SITE:
http://www.radford.edu/wkovarik/class/history/revolutions.html
REVOLUTIONS IN COMMUNICATION
BRINGS UNIQUE APPROACHES
TO THE INTERNATIONAL HISTORY OF MEDIA
• Online supplements – A web
site such as the one at http://www.radford.edu/~wkovarik/class/history/treasury/ could provide supplemental readings, instructor exchanges, and cost reductions.
• International comparisons – An
emphasis on the similarities between US and European media history gives this book international sales potential.
• Multi-disciplinary. This textbook includes
the history of computing, networking, photography, cinema, advertising, and corporate speech along with journalism and broadcasting.
This approach, not taken in any other communications history textbooks, better reflects the associated curricula taught in
modern communications departments.
• Teacher support, particularly for
those who may not have extensive background in media history... Support may include sample tests, study guides, lecture notes
and teaching ideas.
About
the author:
Bill Kovarik is a Professor of Communication
at Radford University in the Blue Ridge
mountains of southwestern Virginia. He is on sabbatical
in the fall of 2009 and serving as the 2009 Canwest Global Media Fellow at the University of Western
Ontario. Kovarik is a journalist and an historian who has worked with wire services, daily newspapers
and national news magazines. He teaches science and environment writing, journalism, web design, media history media law,
and peace studies. He currently writes for Appalachian Voice and other environmental publications.
To hear Bill Kovarik's interview
on NPR with Robert Seigel about Ethanol, click here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7426827
